Comment by woofie11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by woofie11 | Hacker News Reader

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Pretend there's a Programming Quotient (PQ) which is like IQ.

Let's say Google would like candidates with PQ>130 with 95% confidence. Google has an error with std. div. of 15 points in measurement of PQ in jobs interviews. Google then needs to set the hiring bar at 160 PQ in order to get those candidates. This:

- screens most qualified candidates out; but

- most candidates who do screen in are qualified

Statistics would suggest this leaves you with 95% qualified candidates. A more precise Bayesian analysis will show you don't end up with 95% qualified employees, but the basic idea works -- it's still a majority. You set an impossibly high bar, so that candidates hired need to be qualified AND lucky. You discount unlucky candidates, but you don't hire (many) unqualified ones.

The problem, of course, is that all Googlers are convinced they all have a PQ>160, and are superior to everyone else. That's where you get the obnoxious Google incompetent arrogance.

I’ve used Google’s software. I’m not sure they’re all that great.

Someone just released a product that offloads Chrome to the cloud. Gmail has a very long loading screen. Hangouts was replaced by something like 4 incompatible apps. Android phones are significantly less power efficient than iPhones. YouTube copyright notices are trivial to game. Etc

I think the bar I gave, PQ of 130, is about right for Google. Your typical Google programmer is pretty bright and pretty competent, but not spectacular.

Most of what makes big companies succeed or fail is in the overall culture, organizational design, incentive structure, and corporate structure -- properties of a network of individuals rather than of those individuals themselves. I think most of Google's success and failings can be explained that way, much more so than the success or fault of employee quality.

Organizational design is really hard to get right. A senior manager described it like a herd of cats. If you get them all mostly moving in a beneficial direction, you're doing okay.

That's why they pay executives the big bucks. Executives fake understanding how to manage this stuff. Most don't, but they do a good job of convincing boards that they do.

Yeah I don't know, I've been extremely disappointed with Abseil, protobuf, and gMock. So whatever metric they're using, it's not generating particularly great C++.

I wouldn't care about some company's code quality but in these cases Google's clout (due partly from their maladaptive hiring practices) causes these bad libraries to get grandfathered into many projects that I have to deal with.

I've seen amateur programmers produced great code, due to cultures of code review, peer mentorship, high professional standards, and time to think deeply through problems and talk things over.

I've worked in companies where great programmers produced horrible code, due to cultures of optimizing to productivity metrics / features shipped, rushed timelines, and interrupted work schedules with meetings, requirements changes, and people multitasking projects.

I'm not arguing one of those is better than the other. Running a business is about tradeoffs. I am not particularly impressed with anything Google has engineered in the past decade or more. The original search, gmail, Google Docs, Android, Maps, and a few others were brilliant, but those are a long time passing.

On the other hand, I'm not ready to condemn anyone working on those over that. Competence is situational and context-dependent. I also don't have insight into Google business decisions. Google revenues are growing exponentially, so they're clearly doing something right.

> Executives fake understanding how to manage this stuff. Most don't, but they do a good job of convincing boards that they do.

Makes me curious about if you have thoughts about how to find people who are good at that stuff for real (not just faking)

The number of things Google farms out to "the contractors" is crazy. I've talked to a few folks that got to work in the big beautiful facility but, the code they were writing was the worst, "pound it out, who cares how it looks or how well it performs" quality.

> all Googlers are convinced they all have a PQ>160, and are superior to everyone else.

And likewise, other employers looking to hire ex-Googlers are convinced of the same.

Well no-one ever got fired for buying IBM.

They do now.

Except that the measurement error is very clearly fat-tailed, and the std.div. is clearly much larger than one std.div of competence of the population.

Place the bar high enough and you will get more and more people far into the tail, and less and less people that actually fit your bar.

I very much agree with everything you wrote, except for the arrogance bit. Many actually suffer from the impostor syndrome and just a few I could call arrogant. I'm sorry you had to deal with them but please don't generalize from just a few.

Outwards arrogance is often the manifestation of impostor syndrome, but I digress.

Corporate arrogance isn't a property of individual personalities. Most Googlers are perfectly nice people. The Google corporate culture is a whole is rooted in a deep superiority complex and dripping with arrogance. Google believes it knows better than its users, and that translates to all aspects of product design. If you moved those same engineers to a different company, you wouldn't have the same behavior.

I'll also mention that each organizational design has upsides and downsides.

This culture seems to work well in Google's early markets (e.g. search) where users are statistics, and where most problems are hard algorithmic problems, and users are secondary. It has upsides in B2C markets like Google Docs or Android. It crashes-and-burns in a lot of B2B markets, like Workspace or GCP, where customers have a high degree of expertise which ought to be respected.

I'll mention a lot of fintech companies, as well as elite universities, have a similar culture. Those are domains where it leads to success as well.

I'm sure that's true, but I've interviewed there numerous times and I invariably get one or two shockingly arrogant and obnoxious interviewers. The fact that they usually have no idea why I'm being interviewed, and clearly have a lot of other things to do, may be the source of that perception. But it so often feels like "you're already wasting my time, but here's my favorite trick problem that makes me feel smart, man you're a waste of time."

The reason this cannot work is in any process that's that constrained, if there is any factor other than PQ that can get you a position, the outcome of the job interview will be entirely determined by that factor and not at all by PQ.

Instead, you should try to find lots of correlates of PQ and measure them regularly.

This is an excellent way of looking at this and many other high bar organisations - thank you !

It's helpful to explain this to recent grads.

A lot of really good people are discouraged by repeated rejection. However, high levels of rejection of very qualified people are built into this (and many similar) systems. You have to be qualified AND get a lucky die roll to get in the front door. Once people stop taking rejection personally, they can start acting more rationally, and there's less emotional harm. People feel really bad about themselves otherwise.

There are back doors with less luck involved.

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